Great diners - Michael Winner
As well as being Michael Winner's most famous celluloid outing, Death Wish might be a metaphor for the movie director's career as a food critic.
Since writing his first stinging attack on Pont de la Tour in 1991, he's regularly taken the cleaver to the great and the good in posh London restaurant circles. The public view of Winner is one of a truculent, arrogant and objectionable man, but interviewers invariably point out how charming and self-effacing he is. The late Oliver Reed said Winner could be "difficult" but that "he has been honest and there's nothing phoney about him". One thing he certainly isn't is sycophantic, refusing to pull punches if he thinks a chef or establishment is wearing the king's new clothes.
Among the manifold targets of his acid pen have been Michel Roux ("fit only for motorway cafés") and the Michelin-starred Tamarind, described as "looking like a works canteen in Hull". His words have often got him into trouble, at various times being banned from La Gavroche and any venue owned by Antony Worrall Thompson. Winner's career as a critic began at the age of 16 when he started writing film gossip for London newspapers. By the age of 20 he was working for the Beeb and writing his own film scripts. After a spell working in nude movies he moved into the mainstream with 1964's The System, which starred Reed. Winner became a food critic in 1991 when he wrote a stinging attack on Pont de la Tour for the Sunday Times.
He pays for his own food in restaurants and doesn't claim expenses from the paper. "If it wasn't fun, I wouldn't do it", he told the Observer Food Monthly recently. Although now outspoken to the point where he feels to complain in a restaurant provides a service for other diners, Winner claims once to have suffered from the same universal fear of kicking up a fuss as the rest of the country. Among those he admires is Gordon Ramsay, currently without peer as a chef, but he hates the notion of celebrity chefdom and describes the perceived improvement in food standards in recent years as "codswallop" because of the onslaught of freezing and processing.
Like many critics, Winner has little time for others who do the job. As he told The Stage last year: "It's more important that Marlon Brando or Burt Lancaster think highly of me, than some poxy English critic."
